VIDEO: Target comes to Canada, ruins thousands of lives, goes back to America

That was quick.

On Thursday, Target Canada announced it would “discontinue Canadian operations” and shut down all 133 Canadian stores. The move comes only two short years after coming to Canada and buying the leases to over 200 Zellers stores.

The demise of Target Canada means all 17,600 people employed by the company will lose their jobs. (For more on Target’s labour views, see the video below).

Those losses come in addition to 27,300 former Zellers employees who lost their jobs after the original transaction, despite Target promising them a first crack at new jobs (only 1% of ex-Zellers employees ended up with jobs at Target) — all because Target preferred “starting fresh with newly hired staff – and no union,” as the Globe and Mail put it at the time.

Looks like Target hasn’t heard that unions are a “key driver in the creation of the middle class.” 

And just to give you a greater sense of Target’s attitude toward its workers, here’s a clip of an anti-union video from the U.S. It encourages workers not to unionize because “a union can’t guarantee you anything” and “Target makes decisions that are best for our team members, shareholders and guests” so “it doesn’t make sense to expect a company to agree to any union demand.”

Oh, and unions “scare our guests into shopping elsewhere”:

Meanwhile, also on Thursday, Sony announced it is leaving the country, closing down 14 stores. The blows to Canada’s struggling retail sector are just the latest in a string of bad economic news for the Conservative goverment — magnified by “cratering oil prices and eroding federal revenues.”

Photo: JeepersMedia. Used under Creative Commons BY 2.0 license.